What is an uplink and why should you care?

Can you tell offhand the speed of your company’s broadband connection? Right. Not many people can, because at some point, internet connections exceeded the magic limit after which you can hardly notice the effect of any extra speed.

However, as cloud services have become more common, the situation has changed with significant amounts of data now also moving from the company to the internet and not just the other way round. Technically, this data traffic is called the uplink or upstream.

The majority of the current broadband connections have been implemented using the ADSL technology. Regarding the uplink and upstream, the problem with ADSL is that it has been designed to be asymmetric: the download speed is by default many times higher than the upload speed. The traditional phone lines are used most efficiently when the upload speed is limited.

ADSL can now be replaced with many SDSL and fibre-optic connections that are symmetrical, meaning their connection speeds to both directions are the same. In addition, their speed is always the same and does not vary depending on the number of users, as is the case with ADSL connections.

However, the greatest benefit is the faster upload speed. It will make life easier, for example if your company’s backups are processed through the cloud, or if you transfer images, videos, sound, 3D CAD models or other large files between own computers and the cloud or the project document storage.

View the video to find out what would be the ideal connection for your office – DNA’s Ville Virtanen, Head of Department, Access Network, discusses this topic!